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What do the pictures and titles mean??? Here's where you can find out about the beans

For each registered user who posts you will find the certain bits of information which I will now try to define and demystify a little bit. Some of these are more obvious than others, but I'll talk about them anyway.

The "Join Date" is the month and year the user registered in these forums.

The "Location" is something that can be set by the user and may be an actual, physical place or a state of mind or even just something whimsical. Some people don't have this because they didn't set one in their UserCP. There is also a place in UserCP where you can set to display which Ubuntu version you are using so you will often see that listed as well.

Beans are posts. The post/bean count can be turned off by the user if so desired.

There tends to be a close connection between geeks and coffee, so that's where the theme came from. Yes, we know not everyone likes coffee, but it's just a silly thing.

The images, their colors, and the changing icons don't have any special meaning. They simply change as time goes by. You will see (among other things) green coffee beans, roasted (brown) coffee beans, various sorts of coffee cups and mugs and so on. Like the titles, nothing specific is implied by the presence of specific images or titles (in almost all cases...staff, admins and banned users are some of the exceptions). These items are for fun, and are not serious. They are not a rank of any kind. They don't tell anyone how long you've been here nor how many posts you've made. The sayings and the images are a semi-random feature we have to provide a little kick. There is some structure to it, but only on the implementation side. We did this on purpose - because it was fun and whimsical.

There isn't a list of what you get, and when, because that's not the point. The reason for the secrecy was/is this: while we want to reward people who participate in these forums with titles and changing symbols we really don't want them to become some sort of gauge that people use to determine whether someone is speaking with more/less authority on a support topic. Other forums use the title/icon system that way and more power to them. However, there are people here with less than 20 posts who can code circles around much of the staff and are capable of giving amazing and useful responses to support questions...and there are some of us here with thousands of posts (ahem...me?) who might get lucky with a good and helpful reply on occasion. The fear is that people might use post count and titles/symbols as a means of judging the validity of a post's content rather than the content itself. We had a long discussion about this in the forums when they were first started and this subject has been revisited among the staff several times. Some forum members and staff wanted to eliminate the post count and title/icon system completely, some have gone the other way wanting a complete ranking system that is clear and gives honorific titles with great meaning to those with higher post counts (that particular group is in the extreme minority). The current system is a compromise that has been working pretty well for a while. With the compromise of meaningless titles/icons, post count can be hidden in UserCP. Anyway, this is why we don't publish how many posts are necessary for a change in title/icon...it's just a silly reward. The post numbers needed for title changes is something that I understand is easy to modify so it gets modified on occasion, when the admins don't have better things occupying their time, merely to maintain the surprise factor. Bottom line: it just a trivial, whimsically amusing little thing. Don't read too much into it...it really isn't worth the slightest emotional involvement.

EDIT: By the way, you don't get beans for all posts, just for posts in the support areas. Posts in places like the cafe will not add to your bean count.

Referrals in the profile are how many people mentioned that user when registering for a new account.

Last edited by matthew; September 6th, 2010 at 04:25 PM.
Reason: removed a mention of the Backyard since it has been gone for a very long time